In a 2020 interview with The New Yorker, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who turned 80 last October, said he hadn’t been listening to records for a while. “I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t,” he said. “I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.” For most of Sanders’ career as an improvising musician, he was in a studio or on a stage with other musicians, and they listened and played together in real time. But he’s a listener as well as a player, able to respond to what he’s hearing and create beautiful art under different circumstances. His adaptability allowed him to work in a multitude of settings over the years, from harsh free playing through groove-heavy spiritual jazz and excursions into popular song.
In the past year, Sanders worked with Sam Shepherd, the British producer and composer who records under the name Floating Points, on a sweeping, nine-movement piece called “Promises.” Shepherd composed the music, played various instruments, electronic and otherwise, and enlisted the London Symphony Orchestra to perform it. Sometimes the piece is so quiet you might check your volume setting to see if it’s still on, and other times, when the strings hit a crescendo, it’s earth-shaking. In the middle of this tapestry is Sanders, his warm tone and fluid technique undiminished even at 80 years old, listening to his surroundings and finding brilliant patterns to stitch the work together and thus elevate it.
There are clear antecedents to this record. As far as strings and an improvising saxophone, there was Ornette Coleman’s 1972 Skies of America, also recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra—though his arrangements had a biting edge of atonality that would break the spell cast here. Alice Coltrane’s Lord of Lords from the same year has a similar spiritual underpinning, and her arrangement of “Going Home” on that record shares some feeling with this piece. And the combination of squelchy jazz-informed electronics from a young DJ and acoustic improvisation from an elderly master brings to mind Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid’s 2007 record Tongues, and work by Flying Lotus, but those are beat-driven projects and Promises is about melody, harmony, and texture. There’s patience and focus to this piece, all powered by Sanders’ horn.
Throughout its emotional 46 minutes, Promises stirs feelings that can be hard to name. The first sound we hear is one that courses through the entire piece—a brief, seven-note refrain played by what seems to be a harpsichord, sometimes accented by a bell-like tone that could be the celeste. The cluster of sounds begins in silence, and we can hear the creak of wood and some shifting objects in the room where it was recorded, and it repeats every nine seconds for almost the duration of the piece. It’s a small twinkly loop that brings to mind the feeling of awakening, as if something that was unclear is now understood, there to be rediscovered with each cycle. And that repeating fragment holds the composition together, and every sound exists in relation to it, even if we can’t quite sense how they fit together.